Wait, wait… racing snail? Yeah, this is a pretty neat one from a few years ago. The snail is a relatively large version of a bristlebot (incidentally, we believe bristlebots were originated by EMSL). The thing that’s missing here are the bristles. Instead of using a scrub-brush for this large version, [Lenore] discovered that velvet has a somewhat uni-directional grain. But using a piece of mouse-pad cut to the same footprint as the velvet she was able to get the flat-footed snail to move in a forward direction purely through the jiggle of a vibrating motor.

That should work, however the (commercially sold) bristle bots are cheap devices with no control and only one motor. Once you have started adding remote control, a second motor etc. you might as well make it a proper RC toy, perhaps a track driven tank. It would sell better that way at the price it would need to be sold at to pay for the electronics.

I saw the racing snails at Maker Faire. They were awesome! Not very fast, and tended to go around in circles a bit, but fun to watch. If I had one at home, my cats would probably chase it and tip it over, though.